Is it though? I feel like there are a ton of indie games these days that are reasonably priced and run well without using a fuck ton of resources.
I don’t really care if GTA 6 is $100+. It’s the best of the best, maximum effort, no expense spared tier of video game making. I might eventually get it and I might not.
Keep in mind that Super Nintendo games were $60 or $70 in the mid 90s. Games have come down in relative price recently and are only now starting to creep back up, but that’s because gaming has become a massively popular hobby and a lot of people want huge masterpieces like GTA 6 or Elder Scrolls 6.
It’s honestly shocking to me looking back that we were able to afford new games back then. I saved up literal pennies to buy SMB3. The lady at Toys R Us was visibly pissed at me, and more pissed at my mom for letting me pay that way. We weren’t rich, though we were slightly above the middle of middle class. But even my lower middle class friends could afford to buy video games back then.
Conversely, games had little to no resale value back then despite self-evidently coming with the entire contents right there on the cartridge. Basically everything in my NES library when I was a kid except, perhaps ironically, SMB3 came from yard sales and so forth where I bought them for a quarter or fifty cents or whatever.
Is it though? I feel like there are a ton of indie games these days that are reasonably priced and run well without using a fuck ton of resources.
I don’t really care if GTA 6 is $100+. It’s the best of the best, maximum effort, no expense spared tier of video game making. I might eventually get it and I might not.
Keep in mind that Super Nintendo games were $60 or $70 in the mid 90s. Games have come down in relative price recently and are only now starting to creep back up, but that’s because gaming has become a massively popular hobby and a lot of people want huge masterpieces like GTA 6 or Elder Scrolls 6.
It’s honestly shocking to me looking back that we were able to afford new games back then. I saved up literal pennies to buy SMB3. The lady at Toys R Us was visibly pissed at me, and more pissed at my mom for letting me pay that way. We weren’t rich, though we were slightly above the middle of middle class. But even my lower middle class friends could afford to buy video games back then.
It helped that there were used and rental markets for relatively “modern” titles that are now almost entirely non-existent.
Conversely, games had little to no resale value back then despite self-evidently coming with the entire contents right there on the cartridge. Basically everything in my NES library when I was a kid except, perhaps ironically, SMB3 came from yard sales and so forth where I bought them for a quarter or fifty cents or whatever.
It’s probably never been a better for indie games.